We dedicate this website as a tribute to Octavian-Eugen Ganea: a friend, father, mountaineer, and brilliant scientist who left us too soon. We hope to document Octavian's remarkable life from Romania to the USA through which he made impactful contributions to scientific research and touched the lives of many who deeply miss him.

To many of us, Octavian was a mentor and kind friend. He taught his peers the importance of persevering and believing in one's work. We have assembled a collection of stories from his peers to commemorate Octavian through his impact on others. Octavian's own research has advanced the fields of computational methods for natural language processing and the natural sciences. In recognition of his work, the 2022 Molecular Machine Learning Conference was held in his name. Before his unfortunate passing, Octavian had accepted an offer as assistant professor at New York University to continue his work on geometric deep learning for biology and chemistry. Octavian's life work can best be learned about on his webpage .

Octavian is succeeded by his two children and his wife Marina. We invite anyone with additional memories or condolescences to contact us. Thank you for visiting and helping us commemorate Octavian-Eugen Ganea.


  • Born on 26th, September 1987
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, ETH Zurich, 2014-2019.
  • Postdoctoral researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, 2019-2022.
  • Exceptional climber and runner.